Thursday, September 17, 2009

Monopoly Looms on Electronic Voting - Consortiumnews.com

Earlier this month, Election Systems & Software (ES&S), which counted roughly 50 percent of the ballots in the last four major U.S. elections, purchased Diebold’s electronic voting unit, Premier Election Solutions, which controls roughly a third of the voting machine market.

The merger of these two companies has set off alarm bells, and not just in the voting activist community.

Hart InterCivic, a competitor in the voting machine market, has filed a lawsuit seeking a federal court injunction to block the merger as an antitrust violation and a threat to “the integrity of the voting process in the United States.”